Wireless communication technologies are used for providing multiple users with convenient access to services and network connectivity. Recent wireless local area network (WLAN) communication technologies have been proposed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Groups related to the IEEE 802.11 family of standards are developing and commercializing standards that relate to WLANs and their quality-of-service (QoS) improvement, access point protocol, security enhancement, wireless management, etc.
The draft proposed IEEE 802.11ax WLAN standard, also known as high efficiency wireless (HEW), seeks to improve WLAN performance to better support a variety of applications such as video, cloud access, and offloading in diverse environments. To provide high efficiency of WLANs in dense deployments, the IEEE 802.11ax WLAN standard introduces three-dimensional (3D) multiplexing, i.e. time, frequency and space-domain multiplexing, based on multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) and non-MU-MIMO technologies. Real-time control signaling is transmitted from an access point (AP) to a plurality of stations (STAs) to schedule resource allocation for a transmission.
Each control signal may include 3D resource allocation information, which refers to resource allocation of time, frequency and space-domain. This 3D resource allocation information is transmitted from the AP for real time scheduling of transmissions. However, this 3D resource allocation information results in high signaling overhead that could be otherwise used for other traffic or payload data transmission.
Thus, solutions for improving communication efficiency are desired to reduce network overhead and increase resources for payload data transmission in wireless communication systems.